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h-index

I just read in the news about 3 italians who won the prestigeous CASE award. They are relatively young, and I see do not have a very high H-index. I think there was a discussion in Imechanica years ago about the fact that H-index is still an experimental data point where we don't know how else to judge a scientist.

This is an interesting article: Fraud, the h-index and Pasternak. How do we evaluate ourselves and others, especially those not in our own fields? We may not have to find an answer as an individual researcher, but the univeristy adminstrators have to.

On the Web of Science my name appears sometimes as Suo Z and sometimes as Suo ZG. If I search for Suo Z*, papers by a biologist named Suo ZM mix in. Now Suo is a very rare name. I cannot imagine how Wang JS searches for his papers. Last year Michelle Oyen and I talked about assigning a unique identifier to each researcher, much like assigning an ISBN to each edition of a book, or assigning a DOI to each paper.

In preparing cases for faculty appointments, my colleagues in other fields often ask about citations of each candidate and his or her comparees. Despite obvious resistance, my colleagues give following reasons:

We extend the pioneering work of J.E. Hirsch, the inventor of the h-index, by proposing a simple and seemingly robust approach for comparing the scientific productivity and visibility of institutions. Our main findings are that i) while the h-index is a sensible criterion for comparing scientists within a given field, it does not directly extend to rank institutions of disparate sizes and journals, ii) however, the h-index, which always increases with paper population, has an universal growth rate for large numbers of papers; iii) thus the h-index of a large population of papers can be decomposed into the product of an impact index and a factor depending on the population size, iv) as a complement to the h-index, this new impact index provides an interesting way to compare the scientific production of institutions (universities, laboratories or journals).